Sunday, November 21, 2010

Greetings from Maleka Planetarium, Malaysia

Today my team and I spent most of the day unpacking, counting, and organizing the amazing amount of materials that NASA has provided for this event. 

We counted 99,338 different give-aways for educational dissemination -- space weather posters, pizza Suns, Chandra gorgeous photos, books. Everyone who attends the event will get something! I think the kids will especially like this.

Attached is a photo of me checking out some of the boxes.

We also worked with the planetarium staff to finish all the large displays and posters we've brought. There is evidently a rule in Malaysia -- "Nothing gets done until the very last minute." They follow this religiously, but the results are quite fine. We'll have 6 giant 8'x10' displays, one of them, about the Sun, developed by Debbie at Stanford.

The lovely young woman in the photo with me is Gomathy Ramasamy. She likes me a lot, and giggles whenever she sees me. Gomathy has been the organizer at the planetarium who has been working with us. The planetarium staff already knew a lot about me, and have been reading my Facebook page. So I want to say a lot of good things about them.

Gomathy Ramasamy - my wonderful new friend
here at the Melaka Planetarium.
In the evening, we all went for a walk through Melaka, and saw Little India (with beautiful silk clothes), old buildings along the riverfront, and then walked down a place called (Jonker's Walk -- I need to check that) to eat. This place was 
full of vendors and stalls. And, guess what, I saw hundreds of other rubber chickens -- all sizes and shapes, some even like me. I even saw a rubber cow!!! I felt quite at home there. However, none of them were lucky enough to be wearing NASA clothes and walking with NASA scientists.




Today we are supposed to train 60 students from the local university to help us with our activities. I hope to meet some cool new people!

Love,
Camilla




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